Twenty-five years after Oslo, a deepening catastrophe for the Palestinians

Twenty-five years after Oslo, a deepening catastrophe for the Palestinians

By
Bill Van Auken

14 September 2018

Thursday marked the 25th anniversary of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin adopting the Oslo Accords at a meeting in Washington, with US President Bill Clinton hosting the affair.

The accords were supposed to initiate a “peace process” that would result in a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, resolving such issues as the borders between Israel and a Palestinian state, the future of illegal Zionist settlements, the status of Jerusalem and the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

The deal was promoted as a path to the realization of the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination,” supposedly to be achieved by means of “two-state solution,” creating a Palestinian national entity in the lands occupied by Israel in 1967.

The anniversary was barely observed in either Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories. A small meeting at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem addressed by Palestinian and Israeli officials who had backed the accord was broken up by a group of angry young Palestinian demonstrators.

Sections of the Israeli media published articles lamenting the “missed opportunities” of the so-called peace process, while even-handedly apportioning blame. In reality, Oslo served precisely the purpose for which it was intended, providing a cover for unrelenting Israeli aggression over the last quarter century.

US and Israeli officials have marked the anniversary with the aggressive pursuit of a policy that is unabashedly determined by the most right-wing elements within the Israeli state. It is dedicated to forcing Palestinian…